You Have More Power to Heal Yourself Than You Realize

I'll cavern you, and grotto you, and waterfall you, and wood you, and water you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous-sound you, and solitude you.

—John Keats in a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds





Get inspired by listening to my 3-part EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES about Your Long-Term Destiny in the coming months

These forecasts will be available for just one more week.

Who do you want to become in the coming months? Where do you want to go and what do you want to do? How can you exert your free will to create adventures that'll bring out the best in you, even as you find graceful ways to cooperate with the tides of destiny?

To listen to these three-part, in-depth reports, go here.

Register and/or log in through the main page, and then access the horoscopes by clicking on "Long Range Prediction." Choose from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Each part is a standalone report, not dependent on the other two.

If you'd like a boost of inspiration to fuel you in your quest for beauty and truth and love and meaning, tune in to my meditations on your Big-Picture outlook.

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Each of the three-part reports is seven to nine minutes long. The cost is $7 per report. There are discounts for the purchase of multiple reports.

P.S. You can also listen to a short-term Expanded Audio Horoscope for the coming week.





WHERE DOES HELP COME FROM?

I get many requests from people who are going through challenging times in their lives and would like my personal advice. I wish I could respond to these inquiries, because they are often profound and well-thought-out, demonstrating an ability to define the problems at hand with lucid insight.

Unfortunately, I can't respond. My various lines of work are too demanding to add other tasks to my life, no matter how interesting they might be. But I've developed a response to people who seek my personal input. I offer it below.

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I'm honored that you regard me as someone who might be able to provide answers or solace, but I don't think it would be responsible for me to fling advice your way without knowing more about the complexities of your problem. And I'm afraid I can't give the time necessary to explore those complexities.

The only thing I'll suggest, as you seek to clarify your situation, is for you to arrange to go on a retreat. During that time of withdrawal from the world's everyday madness, I urge you to avoid all media and to be as silent and relaxed as it's possible for you to be.

You don't necessarily have to go away to a private sanctuary. You can do it in your own home. And there's no need to try to do the retreat perfectly. Just do the best you can.

During the first part of your retreat, spend time visualizing in your mind's eye the entire story of your life, from the earliest memory to the present moment.

During the second phase of your retreat, begin your meditations by establishing contact with the highest source of wisdom and love within you. You can call this source God or Goddess or your Guardian Angel or Higher Self. Spend luxurious time in dialogue with this source, making sure to ask these questions:

1. "What is it I want more than anything else?"

2. "What is the best way to serve the mission I came to Earth to carry out? What are the very best gifts I have to offer other humans?"

3. "What path will allow me to ultimately learn the most about wise love?"

4. "How do I need to change in order to get what I want, carry out my life's mission, and learn about wise love? What influences and attitudes do I need to eliminate?"

During the third phase of the process, write out a mission statement: what you want to accomplish by the time you die many years hence. Then create a master plan of the actions you will take in order to make that mission statement come true. Include three actions you will take in the next month to get more serious about accomplishing your mission.

During the fourth phase, visualize the following scenarios in lush detail: that God/Goddess loves you, that the entire universe is conspiring to give you the lessons and blessings and kicks in the ass and liberations you need exactly when you need them, and that you are ready to welcome that love and guidance with all your heart.

P.S. I'm a big believer in trusting your intuition. Even if it doesn't lead you to what your ego thinks is a successful outcome, your intuition will always guide you to the experiences that your soul needs.





FREE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

Here's a link to my free weekly email newsletter, featuring the Free Will Astrology horoscopes, plus a celebratory array of tender rants, lyrical excitements, poetic philosophy, and joyous adventures in consciousness. It arrives every Tuesday morning by 7:30 am.

Sign up here for your subscription.





THE ART OF CHANGING YOUR MIND

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
—George Bernard Shaw

Sometimes, being true to yourself means changing your mind. Self changes, and you follow.
—Vera Nazarian

The person who never alters their opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
—William Blake

The interesting thing is always to see if you can find a fact that will change your mind about something, to test and see if you can.
—Diane Sawyer

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
—W. Somerset Maugham

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books.
—Annie Dillard

The snake that can't cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.
—Beverly Cleary

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Only the strongest people have the pluck to change their minds, and say so, if they see they have been wrong in their ideas.
—Enid Blyton

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes.
—Walt Whitman

The willingness to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness.
―Stuart Sutherland

I came from a different mind-set growing up, and my mind has changed.
—Katy Perry

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
—Hannah Arendt

There is no point in asking me general questions because I am always changing my mind.
—Michel Houellebecq

You have the RIGHT to change your mind
—Oprah Winfrey

A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.
— Carl Rogers

We are the sum of our efforts to change who we are. Identity is no museum piece sitting stock-still in a display case, but rather the endlessly astonishing synthesis of the contradictions of everyday life.
—Eduardo Galeano





WHAT IS EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE?

Some people understand emotional intelligence to be a skill at understanding other people's feeling states, having an intuitive grasp of them. That can be a very good thing!

But in this version, emotional intelligence can also be an ability to read people's subtle emanations and signals with such acuity that you can therefore coax them to see things your way, sell them things, influence them.

So people with emotional intelligence in this sense of the word may be highly manipulative.

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My way of defining emotional intelligence contains the context of kindness, empathy, and sensitivity.

Emotional intelligence consists of creating connection that is equal in its power dynamic; that is freed from manipulative agendas; that seeks authentic communion and connection for its own sake, as a form of play that generates magic.


In this model, emotional intelligence has a moral and ethical intention—a quest not to assert one's own needs as more important than the other's, but rather to recognize the other as a Holy Thou who is as worthy of being treated fairly and kindly as oneself.

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Here are further thoughts about emotional intelligence by Asha Sanaker, whose Substack newsletter is here: https://ashasanaker.substack.com/

For me, emotional intelligence is personal, in that it connotes a person who has committed to understanding their own emotional history and tendencies, in order to make more conscious choices about how to act, or not, out of their emotions.

The emotionally intelligent person takes full responsibility, always, for their emotions and how the way that they bring those emotions to the world impacts it.

Emotional intelligence is also relational, because it enables the individual to attend to patterns of emotional behavior in others, and account for those emotions constructively in how they communicate and behave in response to what they sense in the other, hopefully with an eye towards greater connection and deeper mutual respect and care.

Essential to this is a clear sense of "what is mine and what is yours." Folks who are emotionally intelligent can be empathic, but they work to be clear about what comes from them and what they are absorbing from others.

Finally, emotional intelligence is social. The emotionally intelligent person understands that institutions and systems encourage certain emotions and discourage others. These same institutions and systems often are based on power hierarchies, so they dictate who is "allowed" to feel what and when.

The emotionally intelligent person understands this and stands aside from it as much as possible, refusing to submit blindly to it, or force others to submit blindly. The emotionally intelligent person wants everyone to own themselves, and not to be owned.





YOUR OTHER LIFE

In his book My Other Life, Paul Theroux imagines another version of himself—the "story of a life I could have lived had things been different."

Hmmm. One of my other lives might have been that I kept on doing my music career, didn't quit, and just finished recording my 10th album, which has modest sales but is appreciated by critics.

What about you? I invite you to daydream about the inner potentials you've never developed, the interesting destinations you've never actually sought out, the initial interests that never grew into full-fledged relationships -- and then fantasize that you are in fact doing those things.

Aside from being fun, this experiment could lead you to actually try out some possibilities that maybe you should have considered long ago.